The angels of the Hebrew Bible, as we see in the story of Lot and his daughters, resemble not at all the fat cherubs of Renaissance art or the herald angels of which we sing in Christmas carols. In fact, the angels who appear at the gates of Sodom more closely resemble a couple of drifters who wander into town—and turn out to be mass murderers. And a close reading of the Bible suggests that, in some profoundly mystical and even slightly spooky sense, when we behold an angel in the Bible, we may be encountering God himself in the guise of changeling, trickster, and destroyer.
The mysterious figures who appear at the city gates of Sodom are among the first angels whom we encounter in the Bible; the biblical author describes them first as “messengers” (Gen. 19:1) and later as “men” (Gen. 19:10), neither of which necessarily suggests that they possess any divine powers. We know that they eat and sleep, because Lot—like his uncle Abraham back in Mamre—serves them a meal before they go to bed (Gen. 19:3). We are given to understand that they travel to Sodom by foot, “about forty miles of difficult road.”41 And we know that they exert a certain carnal appeal to ordinary human beings because the lusty men who gather outside Lot’s door prefer the two strangers to Lot’s virgin daughters as sexual playthings.
“One must think of the heavenly messengers as young men in their prime,” explained the stately Bible scholar von Rad, perhaps betraying a certain lustiness of his own, “whose beauty particularly incited evil desire.”42
So how do we know that the destroyers are angels at all? The Bible refers to them by the Hebrew word that means “messenger” (mal’akh), a term used to refer to all kinds of emissaries, some human, some divine. The English word “angel,” as we understand it today, derives from the Greek word angelos, which originally meant only “messenger” and was used to render mal’akh in early Greek translations of the Bible. Only when the Bible was translated into Latin were celestial messengers routinely distinguished from flesh-and-blood ones by the use of the Latin term angelus, from which the English word “angel” is derived.43
The mysterious strangers in the story of Lot are presented as messengers on a mission from God, armed with celestial powers and ready to carry out their orders. The first clue that they are something more than merely bringers of bad news comes when the townsfolk try to break down the door of Lot’s house in order to gang-rape them—the mob is struck with blindness by the strangers (Gen. 19:11), and the Hebrew word used in the original biblical text suggests that the strangers literally dazzle their attackers with a supernatural explosion of light, “a blinding flash emanating from angels.”44
But the mystery as to the nature of these two messengers only deepens when the biblical storyteller describes the devastation that befalls Sodom and Gomorrah: Is it the angels, or is it God himself, who does the dirty work? At first the two strangers announce themselves as the destroyers of Sodom and Gomorrah. “We will destroy this place,” they tell Lot, “because … the Lord has sent us to destroy it” (Gen. 19:13). Moments later it is God himself who is depicted as the destroyer: “The Lord rained down fire and brimstone from the skies upon Sodom and Gomorrah” (Gen. 19:24–25 NEB). Characteristically, the biblical author never allows us to know with clarity whether God is acting on his own or empowering his angelic messengers to act on his behalf.
Or perhaps God is doing both at once, appearing interchangeably as a man (or several men) and an angel (or several angels). The same curious phenomenon of God as changeling is found throughout the Hebrew Bible: Is it God, or an angel, or merely a mortal man who wrestles with Jacob by night and is defeated by Jacob at sunrise (Gen. 32:25)? Is an angel of death or the Almighty himself who sets upon Moses in a murderous rage on the road to Egypt (Exod. 4:24–26)? (See chapter eight.) All of these strange encounters between God and man betray a certain nagging anxiety and a deep, almost neurotic conflict that besets the biblical authors whenever a human being draws near to the deity.
The Hebrew Bible is uncomfortable with the depiction of any direct encounter between God and a human being. Indeed, when God appears at all, he usually chooses a manifestation that somehow seems more like a magician’s trick or special-effects wizardry than a glorious revelation of the Lord of the Universe: a bush that “burned with fire [but] was not consumed” (Exod. 3:2), a “pillar of cloud by day” or a “pillar of fire by night” (Exod. 13:21), or a disembodied voice heard only by a child in a darkened room (1 Sam 3:8–9). Even Moses, the only human who is said to actually speak with God “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exod. 33:11 KJV), is permitted to see God only once and only from behind. “Thou canst not see My face,” God admonishes his chosen one, “for man shall not see Me and live” (Exod. 33:20). After his sojourn in the presence of God on Mount Sinai, Moses suffers with something like a case of divine radiation burn—his face shines with a mysterious light and he is forced to wear a veil to avoid scaring the wits out of the Israelites (Exod. 34:29–35).
So angels turn out be a convenient device for a priesthood that wants its followers to regard God as aloof and reclusive, mercurial and sometimes even murderous, so dangerous that only a single man in all of history is permitted to encounter him “face to face.” That is why some Bible scholars suggest that the whole notion of a celestial go-between, whether in the guise of a seemingly ordinary human being or a bewinged sword-wielding archangel, is a pious fraud that found its way into the Bible. The scribes who preserved the sacred texts of ancient Israel, it is suggested, took it upon themselves to “[tone] down” the encounters between God and human beings by “interposing an angel” between the Creator and his creatures in the pages of Holy Scripture.45
Christianity, of course, is perfectly comfortable with the idea of God manifesting himself in human form and even dying a mortal death by the hands of his own creatures. “[T]he Word was God,” declares the Gospel according to John (John 1:1, 14 KJV), “[a]nd the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” One early church father insisted that the figure who calls upon Abraham is the Logos, an earthly incarnation of the Word of God,46 and the fact that two others accompanied him is seen in Christian tradition as the earliest augury of the Trinity.47 After his death and entombment, Jesus appears at the side of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, walking and talking with them, but they regard him as merely a fellow traveler on the road—“Are thou only a stranger in Jerusalem?”—until he reveals himself as the resurrected Son of God. And even then, like God at Abraham’s tent, Jesus pauses to share a humble meal—a bit of broiled fish and a piece of honeycomb—with his disciples (Luke 24:18,37, 41-43 KJV).
Still, even the disciples are unnerved by the appearance of the Son of God in the guise of an ordinary man. No one is blinded by celestial light, no herald angels sing, no one’s face is set aglow, and yet the manifestation of God is all the more eerie precisely because it is so ordinary: “[T]hey were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit,” the New Testament says of the disciples who suddenly realize that Jesus is standing among them. “Behold my hands and my feet,” Jesus says. “[A] spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:38–39 KJV). The unsettling sensation of seeing God as a creature of flesh and bone is echoed in an emblematic work of our own anxiety-ridden century. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” muses T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land,48 evoking the subtle and sometimes affrighting experience of Abraham at the terebinths of Mamre and the disciples on the road to Emmaus, all of whom encountered not an angel but God himself as the third man.
Still, the prospect of an unmediated experience of God has always troubled religious authority of all faiths. After all, if God is thought to make a habit of appearing to men and women without going through the proper channels of ritual and prayer, all suitably supervised by rabbi or priest or minister, how can we know whether the guy who claims to have dined on veal roast with the Almighty last night is a prophet or a madman? The high priests of ancient Israel, too, appeared to regard the description of any direct encounter
between God and humankind as so subversive that the Hebrew scribes may have been compelled to insert an angel or two whenever God himself chose to make a personal appearance.
LIFE AGAINST DEATH
Whether Sodom or Gomorrah were destroyed by God himself, or his angelic host, or, as some scholars have suggested, an eruption of subterranean gases brought on by a random seismic tremor in an area long known for its earthquakes and its bitumen deposits,49 the story of Lot and his daughters reminds us that God himself is depicted in the Bible as a moody and mercurial deity who is more often the destroyer than the creator of human life. And it is Lot’s daughters, seducers of their own father, who defy not only the taboo against incest but also the ill temper and possibly the ill will of the Almighty himself. Lot is a tragic buffoon, but his daughters are heroines.
If there is a single overarching theme in the Bible—a single primal drive that animates the men and women whose lives are chronicled in its pages—it is the affirmation of life and the celebration of childbearing. The opening passages of Genesis show God as a creator and life-giver: “Be fruitful, and multiply” is the first and oft-repeated command of God to his creatures (Gen. 1:28). So, too, does God promise countless offspring to Abraham. “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars, if thou be able to count them,” God says to Abraham. “So shall thy seed be” (Gen. 15:5).
We can readily understand the basic economic rationale that explains the biblical obsession with bearing children. War, disease, famine, and natural disaster put life at terrible risk in biblical times; a family was likely to lose children at an early age, and an abundance of babies increased the odds that enough of them would survive into adulthood to provide labor in the fields, defense against marauders, and support for aging parents. A large family was the social security of the biblical era.
But a brood of healthy children is not merely a source of wealth and status for the men and women whose lives are depicted in the Bible. Children are a flesh-and-blood symbol of divine blessing, and infertility is regarded as an affliction and a punishment. “Give me children,” Rachel begs the patriarch Jacob, “or else I die” (Gen. 30:1), and the same urgent plea can be heard on the lips of men and women throughout the Bible. God himself makes the very point by denying children (or sometimes even killing them) when he is displeased and bestowing children as a sign of divine favor: God afflicts Job by permitting Satan to kill his seven sons and three daughters, and blesses Job by giving him a replacement set of children even more beautiful than the first (Job 42:13–15).
So we are reminded that God is the taker as well as the giver of life, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is hardly the first time that God turns against his own creatures. By the time hellfire rains down on Sodom, God has already judged all of humankind except Noah and his family to be unworthy of life, and he has exterminated everyone and everything on earth except the chosen remnant. “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man and beast,” God tells Noah as he reveals his dark side. “The end of all flesh is come before me” (Gen. 6:7, 13). Nor is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the Plain the last time that God will become a destroyer rather than a creator of human life. “I kill, and I make alive; I have wounded, and I heal,” God will later boast to Moses after killing the firstborn of Egypt. “I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood, and My sword shall devour flesh” (Deut. 32:39, 42).
Lot’s daughters see with their own eyes what terror God is capable of visiting upon the men, women, and children whom he created in the first place. While Sodom and Gomorrah are blasted into ruins on the far horizon, these two young women are witness to an act of divine violence so arbitrary, so excessive, and so petty that God appears not merely wrathful but slightly demonic: they are forced to watch as the Almighty turns their mother—a woman whose only offense is that she looks back on the smoking ruins of Sodom after being told not to do so—into a pillar of salt, thus providing the enterprising tour guides of the last century or so with something to show the tourists during their excursions to the Dead Sea.
Why does Lot’s wife look back? The traditional (and highly sexist) view is that she is so curious about what is happening back in Sodom that she cannot resist the impulse to look and see, to “spy out the mystery of God,” as one commentator loftily puts it.50 Others suggest that she is saddened at the prospect of leaving Sodom, a place that she loves despite (or, perhaps, because of) its sinfulness.51 Both of these interpretations, of course, encourage us to see her as flawed, whether by idle curiosity or by a longing for the fleshpots of Sodom, and thus somehow deserving of her half-comical, half-tragic fate: Presto change-o, and she is suddenly turned into stone by the Divine Prestidigitator.
A depiction of Lot’s wife that I find more comforting, if rather less flattering to God himself, can be found in the rabbinical literature. According to a countertradition among the sages, she despairs of the fate of her other daughters, the ones whose husbands laugh at Lot’s warnings and refuse to flee the city, and so she casts a single backward glance toward the doomed city where her innocent children are suffering along with the sinners. “Her mother love,” the rabbis speculated, “made her look behind to see if her married daughters were following.”52 And one contemporary Bible scholar, D. Alan Aycock, has compared Lot’s wife to other biblical figures whom he calls “suspended heroes”—“Noah in his ark upon Ararat, Isaac tied to the altar below Abraham’s knife … and Jesus on the cross”53—all of whom are innocents who are made to suffer despite their innocence by a deity who is quite capable of random acts of violence.54
So we are left with only Lot and his daughters, and it is these two women who stand out as the real (and only) heroes of the tale. Lot’s daughters, like his wife, are unnamed in the Bible—a considerable slight in a book whose authors are fairly obsessed with genealogies and the giving and meaning of names—but they show themselves to be bold, intrepid, and resourceful young women who are willing to defy the taboo against incest and the apparent will of God in order to restore life to the blasted and empty place that they behold from their mountain refuge.
Significantly, the elaborate seduction of their father is described without a single disapproving word from the biblical author. Lot’s daughters are spared the harsh judgment that is visited upon so many other women in the Bible. Starting with Eve and that damned apple, women have been depicted (and mostly condemned) as the willful and wily seducers of men: Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39:7), Delilah (Judges 16:5), and Salome (Matt. 14:6–8)55 are only some of the most famous examples. Even the daughter of the patriarch Jacob, a woman who is the apparent victim of rape, is blamed by some of the more misogynistic rabbinical sages for provoking her rapist. (See chapter five.) And a minority tradition in the rabbinical literature reaches a similar conclusion about Lot’s daughters: “Lot is a warning example to men to avoid being alone with women, lest [they] should entice them to sin, as did Lot’s daughters.”56
But the vast weight of rabbinical commentary overlooks the manner in which Lot’s daughters impregnate themselves and focuses instead on their noble motive: Lot’s daughters know that Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities have been destroyed. They have no reason to believe that anyone besides their father and themselves have survived. They are alone in the empty wilderness of the Judean desert, and they have no prospect of finding a suitable husband. But life must be preserved, as the Bible insistently reminds us, even if God shows himself to be utterly indifferent or even openly hostile to the survival of the creatures on whom he bestowed life in the first place. When Lot’s daughters take it upon themselves to bear children and thereby to repopulate the earth, at all costs and by any means necessary, the taboo against incest may be, must be, ignored.*
In fact, according to one tale told by the sages, God himself recognized the purity of Lot’s daughters in sleeping with their father and actually assisted them in the seduction by miraculously planting a supply of wine in a nearby cave. �
�Lot’s daughter found the wine with which they made their father drunk,” the tale goes. “God caused the wine to be put in that place in order that they should succeed in their plan.”57
The incestuous seduction of the drunken Lot serves the biblical manifest destiny of humankind in two vital ways. First, the simple act of bearing and rearing children is a fulfillment of the fundamental commandant to “be fruitful and multiply,” an act that preserves Lot’s bloodline in the face of extinction. If Lot’s daughters had not borne his children, his name and line would have ended once and for all in that desert cave along with the other victims of Sodom and Gomorrah. Second, and even more important in the eyes of the biblical authors, the birth of the two boys—sons and grandsons of Lot at the very same time—is a crucial link in the unbroken chain of life that leads directly from Creation to the Messiah.
The Bible tells us, by the way, that the sons of Lot’s daughters are the eponymous patriarchs of two nations, Ammon and Moab, that will become the bitter enemies of the Israelites. Located to the east of Canaan in what is now the modern nation of Jordan, Ammon and Moab are specifically spared from conquest when God sends the Israelites into the Promised Land under a banner of war. “Be not at enmity with [them],” God says, “because I have given [Moab and Ammon] unto the children of Lot for a possession” (Deut. 2:9, 19). Nevertheless these two nations will become geopolitical rivals of Israel, and the Israelites will meet them repeatedly on the field of battle. “Come, and let us cut her off from being a nation,” the prophet Jeremiah rails against Moab, and he vows a similar fate for Ammon: “And it shall become a desolate mound, and her daughters shall be burned with fire” (Jer. 48:2, 49:2).
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 7